1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to multi-screen session mobility between terminal groups.
Portions of the disclosure of this patent document contain material that is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office file or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever.
Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Solaris and all Java-based trademarks and logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Products bearing SPARC trademarks are based upon an architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc.
2. Background Art
In modem computing a user might have many computer programs running at the same time. In this situation, the user may want to switch between the computer programs. The number of running computer programs may become so large that the physical size of the output device will be too small to effectively show the user all of the programs. This makes it difficult for the user to switch between the programs.
One solution is to display the larger computing environment on more than one output device, termed a xe2x80x9cmulti-headxe2x80x9d configuration. Using the multi-head configuration, a user will operate a computer and have the multiple output devices arranged in such a manner that the entire environment can be displayed on the output devices. One example of such an arrangement is shown in FIG. 1. Computing environment 100 is partitioned into segments 110-130. Segments 110-130 are displayed on output devices 140-160. In this configuration three output devices are used where there is one row of such devices and three columns, but other two dimensional arrangements are equally applicable.
Problems occur with the multi-head configuration when a user desires to stop the interacting with the device connected to the multi-head configuration, such as a computer, an access terminal, or a human interface device, moves to a new device. Specifically, it is problematic when the user expects to begin interacting with the new device at precisely the point where the user stopped interacting with the first device and the different locations have different output configurations. For instance, the three screen output configuration of FIG. 1 may differ in a new location where there night be only one output device or another multi-head configuration, such as one where there are multiple rows. It is difficult to map the output of the computing device to an arbitrary configuration of output devices.
The present invention is for multi-screen session mobility between terminal groups. The invention uses a set of screen groups and a set of terminal groups to perform a mapping of the screen groups onto the terminal groups. A terminal group is a set of logically associated terminals (e.g., output devices). A screen group is a set of screens associated with a single display for a single session that is output by a computing device, such as a server computer. Both the screen groups and the terminal groups have a geometry, which in one embodiment is defined by columns and rows.
In cases where the number of columns in the screen group is less then or equal to the number of columns in the terminal group and where the number of rows in the screen group is also less then or equal to the number of rows in the terminal group, a first mapping scheme is employed. In cases where the number of columns in the screen group exceeds the number of columns in the terminal group or the number of rows in the screen group exceeds the number of rows in the terminal group, a second mapping scheme is employed.
In one embodiment, the first mapping scheme maps the screen group directly onto the terminal group. In one embodiment, where the second mapping scheme is employed, screen flipping is used to allow a user to navigate within the terminal group where there are more screens than can be viewed at one time using the terminal group.